Couple Growing Food *Year Round* in a Backyard Permaculture Micro Farm with Geodesic Dome Greenhouse

foreign [Music] nothing makes me happier than growing food and nurturing my plants and then sharing that this is the ecobubble the whole idea for the property was to not only grow our own food for ourselves but to also hopefully produce enough that we can share that with a local community We are following permaculture methodology and so we're not using any herbicides pesticides we're trying to attract pollinators and make it a safe space for basically any living creature on the little half acre and then having the geodesic dome gave us the ability to actually produce food year round so that's what we've been experimenting with now for I guess the last year and a half and it's definitely there's a learning curve with it but we were able to sell bags of mixed greens and and lettuce this past winter which was awesome and also learning about canning and dehydrating and trying to figure out all the ways that we can use all the food to get us through the year foreign just about growing food and being self-sufficient winter here is truly a long drawn out experience the idea was to create this bubble of paradise where you can go out in January and the second you walk in there you feel much better well you know in Toronto for so many years we we had basically keyboard jobs Deborah managed a large Veterinary Clinic and I managed an I.T team so we just wanted to get away from those keyboards and we were able to sort of indulges something completely different we've both just always bonded on growing Foods in our yard and so it just made all the sense in the world and the cost of property out here was obviously better than the cost of property in Toronto [Music] we've only been here a couple of years now and it was just a blank slate like it was basically one big Square 150 feet by 150 feet exactly half an acre of lawn at first we were just sort of mowing the lawn on this John Deere thing you know a four-wheeler ever been on one before and then little by little we started adding Gardens and turning that lawn into basically Deb's vision Gabe's mother used to Farm close to an acre We inherited her entire sea collection so we came here and literally had tens of thousands of seeds and it's fun because it's all in Italian a little old lady writing I loved the concept of permaculture I love the idea of trying to work with nature versus controlling nature and I'm also a lazy Gardener so the idea of no-till and chop and drop and naturalizing and not having to like weed everything within an inch of its life every season is really appealing right now we're basically in late spring early summer so the Gardens at this point it's that stage where I think oh my gosh nothing is going to grow but four weeks from now it will be a jungle out there [Music] I had actually done about a Year's worth of research in regards to what type of gardens I wanted to grow vegetables in I'm conscious of the fact that we're getting older I wanted something that was a little higher up and I came across Hugo culture and I just thought it was brilliant because it means that I can use everything on the property pruning's you know weeds as long as they're not seeded and the old dead wood and layers of straw and basically everything that I chop down goes right back into the hugels and just love the fact that there's hardly any water that needs to go into them so there's water conservation there Gabe has actually been doing the lawnscaping so there are actual areas on the property that we don't mow and so like circles and and those will some day be more Gardens and so we're just gonna slowly take it over one inch or one foot at a time we built an orchard area at the back it's years away from probably producing actual fruit but we have paw paws American hazelnuts Wild Plum there's the existing pear tree back there on this side of the house we actually have what we call butterfly alley and that is specifically native plantings that are to attract specific types of pollinators a big one for us is monarch and swallowtail butterflies [Music] here we are in Southwestern Ontario a year-round growing means dealing with minus 20 Celsius in January and plus even 40 last week in June and the Dome sort of provides a way to stabilize stuff I came across Arctic Acres they had literally just started up we were one of their first earliest domes the Dome comes in a kind of Kit and it was a lot of fun building it the frame of it is Cedar which is nice because it's oily and withstands humidity that's covered in polycarbonate panels triple glazed so you have a higher r value but you lose light value it has the pond in the back it's about 11 feet across and four feet wide so that is basically your heat sink they actually recommend that about 70 percent of your surface is covered in plants that actually helps in regards to maintaining that temperature and it's it is an ecosystem so basically the fish eat food they poop and that actually helps to fertilize the plants that are in the pond and the plants help keep the water clean and so basically the light comes into the Dome hits that reflectix the light bounces into your pond and that's what kind of Heats that up and creates warm air and that gets sucked through the O tubes under the soil beds all the way through to keep it warmer in the winter so it's it's to help you regulate your temperatures it does its best but we do have to use some Hydro to supplement um you know again this sort of controlled environment so we try to maintain about 10 degrees Celsius as our lowest temperature there's definitely winter season challenges because plants for the most part need 10 hours of sunlight per day to grow we bought like eight grow lights and then we got our first hydro bill and so that was the end of the grow lights and so then it became okay well what grows in these conditions for the most part it really is going to be kale mustard greens mixed greens lettuces you can do Kohlrabi did grapes broccoli cauliflower all those kind of things do wonderful in the winters obviously it's only been a year and a half so there's been a lot of experimenting could I be producing more food probably and I think we'll get there last year I overdid it with tomato plants we gave away over 7 000 tomatoes because I just honestly all I could do was Harvest I had no time to sell them Market them or I just take the tomatoes we we don't have to buy Lettuce we we don't have to buy any type of green at all anymore this year will be our first potato Harvest so hopefully should be enough to get us through to the end of the year I think and I pickled beets last year dehydrated things and even beyond the the sort of fruit and vegetable Harvest there's like there's garlic Scapes or zucchini flowers which are such a treat or certain greens that you never thought you could eat like radish green there are definitely some things that we still have to buy on a regular basis like carrots they can be a really difficult thing to grow in the garden and some things you think you're going to have tons of it and then a pest comes through and wipes everything out in a matter of like a week or two thank you [Music] we have a farm gate stand and wasn't really sure how it was going to go but I used social media to basically put the word out that any of my Surplus would be in the stand as often as possible and I was a little bit embarrassed at first because you know some days literally you're like oh great I've got like six radishes and you know some lettuce but it was actually really amazing how people responded on social media I used um obviously a hashtag for the ecobubble but I also did a hashtag of let's feed each other so this year I'm going with suggested pricing so I'm really setting it up as pay what you can or veggie exchange and again we want to deal with food insecurity in the area I think times have been really tough over the last two years for a lot of people we we wanted a place where we could grow food 365 days a year you have to build something though to do that you need some kind of infrastructure so the cost layout you know it's kind of high I guess so it's not like everyone can just run out and buy a greenhouse for their backyard and enjoy it in the wintertime there is work and investment I think for me it's like a hobby keeps you busy and challenged and learning it's amazing to walk out into your Gardens to be able to do that in January February is even more special so to be able to have fresh salad or fresh tomatoes in the middle of winter or very very early spring Nothing Compares subscribe to exploring Alternatives and check out our playlists for more stories like this you can also follow Deborah and Gabe on Facebook and on their website at the ecobubble thanks for watching [Music]

Channel: Exploring Alternatives

Views: 503,609

Keywords: backyard, micro, farm, farming, garden, food, forest, hugelkultur, permaculture, geodesic, dome, greenhouse, orchard, pollinators, homestead, couple, Ecobubble, growing, fruit, vegetables, farm gate, stand, selling, raised, beds, straw, bales, compost, winter, gardening, year round, 4 season, all season, year, seasons, production, self, sufficient, homesteading, trees, story, documentary, Exploring Alternatives, northern, climate, north, lawn, transformed, transformation, interview, profile, pond, passive, solar, heat, sink, natural, local

Id: rQEYI8FZ7Lo

Length: 11min 31sec (691 seconds)

Published: Sun Jul 10 2022